Tuners

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 138

Best Clip-On Instrument Tuner

Snark SN-2

I’ve tried several clip-on guitar and banjo tuners over the years, and I finally found the best one: Snark SN-2. It’s fast, easy to use, and very accurate. Best of all, it’s cheap: $13. It’s optimized for all instruments. If you only need it for guitar, get the $10 Snark SN-1.

The build quality seems better than the previously reviewed Intellitouch, and the display is much nicer (glasses not required). And it’s really fast and responsive. Plus, it has a “tap tempo” thing so you can tap the button along with the tune and it will tell you the beats per minute. — John Walkenbach

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Tune up with an iPhone

Planet Waves Tune Up

I’ve been using this tuner on my iPhone for about a year now. It’s a great, accurate and very cheap guitar tuner. I’ve tried other tuner apps, but they were not as accurate as this one. The free Gibson Learn & Master-app, which includes a chromatic tuner, is not usable because it is far from being accurate. I also tried another free app called Acoustic Guitar which again doesn’t work because you have to rely on your ears to tune your guitar.

I’ve compared Tune Up to my standalone Boss TU12 guitar tuner. The iPhone’s builtin microphone is much more sensitive than the TU12’s built-in mic, so it much easier to tune up an unplugged electric guitar with the TuneUp app.

The biggest disadvantage of the TuneUpapp is that for unplugged electric guitars it is quite unusable in noisy environments as it will pickup too many surround sounds. This is one of the main reasons why I’m not selling my TU12 as I rely on the ability to plug in the electric guitar directly into the tuner. Also, for adjusting the bridge-saddles I still rely on the TU12, with the guitar directly plugged in the TU12. But that’s because I still have not adjusted a guitars bridge setup using the iPhone-app. Maybe I will in the near future… — Douwe Rijpstra

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Best guitar capo

G7th Capo

This is the best capo on Earth. The unique one-way cam lets you adjust tension in tiny increments with a squeeze. Unlike every other capo I’ve used, it can apply enough tension to cleanly fret the string without bending it sharp. Works on acoustic and electric instruments equally well. The build and finish quality are absolutely superb. The G7th capo is a brilliant piece of gear for the discerning guitarist. — David MacNeill

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Play a wind instrument only you can hear

Electronic Wind Instrument

As an amateur musician living in a small house, I can’t always pick up my saxophone or flute when I have the urge to make music. Nighttime is off limits, and even during the day I can’t always find a time when I won’t be disturbing the rest of the household. We have a digital piano that I can use with headphones or a computer, but as a wind player I find the keyboard too limiting.

About three years ago, I solved this problem by buying an Akai EWI USB electronic wind instrument. It lets me play quietly, or even silently, while providing more ways to make music than would be practical with real instruments. You hold it like a clarinet or saxophone, touching key pads placed in a similar arrangement to the keys of a real instrument, and blow into a mouthpiece that senses the pressure of your breath. It produces no sound of its own. Instead, you plug it into a computer and choose from dozens of wind, brass, and string instruments to mimic. Add a pair of headphones, and you have a self-contained music studio you can use any time of day or night. You can practice tunes and scales, play along with recordings, and even create your own compositions and arrangements using multiple instruments.

The instrument selection provided by the Akai software includes a full range of woodwinds, brass, and orchestral strings, along with some pitched percussion (like xylophone and glockenspiel) and an assortment of unique synthesizer sounds. The selection includes all the sizes of saxophones, clarinets, brass, double reeds, flutes, and viols. Part of the fun of the EWI is getting to play instruments that you’ve never touched in real life. For instance, I spend a lot of time using the violin sound, and noodling around on bass clarinet or tuba is a blast. The instrument sounds are quite good. The ability to control the volume with your breath adds a natural expressiveness that makes up for the synthetic timbre of some of the instruments. A casual listener might not realize she is hearing an electronic instrument, particularly the clarinets and violin/cello/bass voices.

The EWI’s controls strike a balance between simplicity and realism. Unlike a real instrument, it’s “keys” don’t move. Instead, they are raised metal pads that sense when you are touching them. The layout of the keys closely matches that of a saxophone, though you can configure it to use fingerings that are more similar to a flute, oboe, or even a trumpet. You control the octave using a set of four rollers under your left thumb that give the EWI a five-octave range. Another pair of sensors allows you to bend notes up or down with your left thumb. The mouthpiece, in addition to sensing your breath, also senses the pressure of your bite, providing a way to add vibrato to your tone.

The lack of moving parts makes it extremely reliable, but to your fingers it’s more like playing a keyless instrument like a recorder than a saxophone. It doesn’t take long to get used to once you’ve chosen a fingering configuration.

The real power of the EWI USB and the Akai software comes when you combine them with a music application like GarageBand. The Akai software can act as a plug-in to Garage Band and other software. You can record multiple tracks using different instrument voices. This has greatly expanded my musical capabilities, and I’m now experimenting with creating my own band arrangements.

The EWI USB is not without its flaws. While I’ve had no problems with the Akai software on Macintosh, I’ve seen some pretty severe complaints from Windows users. Users have posted their workarounds and solutions for the Windows problems on the web, but Windows users might want to buy from a retailer with a good reputation for support (like Patchman music). Though it’s a MIDI instrument, it doesn’t have a MIDI port; you have to plug it into a computer. Akai’s documentation is a bit sparse, and doesn’t provide much information on how to use the EWI with other software. Another problem is that some of the instrument voices sound a bit artificial. Even with breath control, the EWI can’t mimic the variety of sounds that a good player gets out of a real saxophone or trumpet.

Akai makes a somewhat more advanced version, the EWI4000S, that has a MIDI port and its own built-in sound generator. This might be a better option than the EWI USB if you want to use it in a live performance. Yamaha also makes an advanced wind controller that has moving keys and a mouthpiece that can more closely mimic reed instruments. Both these options are at least twice as expensive as the EWI USB, and may require additional hardware and software instrument “patches” (instrument voices) to match those provided with the EWI USB. — Tom Sackett

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Affordable guitar flight case

CaseXtreme Clam

Flying with a guitar that you care about can be a nerve-racking experience. Normal guitar cases don’t offer enough protection and the professional’s standard Calton cases are $600+ and heavy enough to make your arms lengthen.

Here’s a case designed for flying that is light, well designed and pretty much indestructible. It costs around $160-$200 and you can put your instrument in it by itself, in a soft and light gig bag or in your normal hard shell case. I like to put the guitar in a gig bag to use for light weight protection when I get to my destination.

The case also comes with well designed wheels that you attach with velcro and are stored in the case when not in use. — David M. Siegler

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Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.

05/19/25

Google clean mode/Career Dreamer/Underrated Rituals

Recomendo - issue #462

Google’s hidden clean mode

By adding “udm=14” to your Google search URL, you can strip away all the AI summaries, knowledge panels, and ads that clutter the results. This doesn’t improve the actual search results, but it provides a cleaner, distraction-free interface reminiscent of Google’s early days. You can set this up as a custom search engine in most browsers, making it your default search experience. Or you can just go here. — MF

Exploring career possibilities

The challenging thing about finding a job these days is that most people, especially young ones, are not aware of their own marketable skills and are not aware of all the possible careers those skills can aid. Google has a new, free, AI-based, web-based service, Career Dreamer, that will assist you to clarify your marketable skills, match them with possible kinds of jobs you probably didn’t know about, provide you with current job openings of that type near you, and then help draft a resume aimed at those opportunities. Google calls it “a playful way to explore career possibilities with AI,” and it’s a great use of AI. — KK

Underrated Rituals

In the Simple Living subreddit, someone asked, “What’s a simple, underrated ritual that genuinely changed your life—and you wish you’d started earlier?” The top-voted comments included advice like reading books instead of screens before bed, washing dishes at night to feel “on top of things” in the morning, and taking regular 20-minute afternoon naps to reset internally. But the most surprising advice that seems useful to try was: if you work from home, turn on a desk lamp when you start work and turn it off when you finish—a simple light cue to mark the start and end of your day and help you switch modes. Another interesting tip is to incorporate a minute of silence in the car before heading out on the road to help shed the flurry of prep and loading, and to let your subconscious catch up before you drive off. — CD

Hand-crank grater

This hand-crank grater keeps your knuckles away from the blades while shredding cheese blocks and vegetables like carrots and zucchini. It sticks to the counter with suction cups and comes with three swappable grating drums. You’ll need to pre-cut larger items to fit the chute. Cleanup is simple since everything pops apart and goes in the dishwasher. Worth the counter space. — MF

Population around a point

This simple map tool will tell you the human population from any point in the world, for whatever radius you select. I’ll be visiting the Scottish Highlands soon, and it’s interesting to know that the village near where I’ll be staying has a population of less than 800 within a 20 km radius. — CD

New space frontier

I thoroughly enjoyed When The Heavens Went on Sale, a new book by Ashlee Vance that recounts in entertaining detail the creation of the new space frontier: scrappy startups inventing small, fast, cheap rockets and satellites, and against all odds, succeeding where NASA could not. The cast of misfits, bigger-than-life visionaries, genius jerks, and admirable old-school engineers is vast, and way beyond Elon Musk (who only appears in Ashlee Vance’s other book, a Musk biography). Vance spent many years hanging out on this frontier, attending endless test failures, hearing the intimate dreams of the makers, and via this deep immersion, he explains in thrilling detail the innovations and technology that has created this new industry. An excellent documentary was filmed in parallel with the book, Wild, Wild Space (HBO Max) and it gives you a great sense of the key characters in this new wild, wild west. — KK

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05/18/25

Real ID Day/Remote Worker Conferences/Maya Train

Nomadico issue #155

* Quick note from me: I’ll be having a live Q&A call on travel deals, living abroad, and the nomadic life for paid subscribers on May 20. If you’d like to upgrade and join us, please do so before then.

Real ID (for Real This Time)

After what feels like a decade of pushed-back warnings, the “Real ID” requirements are now a reality at US airports as of today. A passport works fine and all states are now compliant with new drivers’ licenses issued, but if your license is old enough, you may not have the little gold star in a corner showing you’re good to go. So that piece of plastic won’t cut it for domestic flights anymore. You’ll need to obtain a separate ID with better security or renew your license to update. See the details here.

Conferences for Remote Workers and Owners

I’m currently attending the Dynamite Circle Mexico conference in Playa del Carmen, a get-together for remote-first companies and entrepreneurs. They also run one in Bangkok each year and various regional ones organized by locals. I’m rubbing shoulders with quite a few millionaires at this one but there are more casual options filled with solopreneurs like the Bansko Nomad Fest in June that I’ve attended twice, the Nomad Cruise Summit at Sea, and Nomad Summit (next one in Chiang Mai in January).

South From Cancun by Train

To get to Playa del Carmen for this event I’m at, I got back on the Maya Train to ride a section of it that wasn’t open when I was in the area a year ago. There’s a free shuttle from the Cancun airport to the nearby train station, then a pleasant train ride of less than an hour that avoids the swarms of tourist and worker traffic on the main highway between the two places. The fare is around $12. The one big drawback is that the Playa del Carmen train station is way out of town and requires a bus ride (another 3 bucks) to get into the city itself. You can also only buy tickets a week out or sooner at the official website. The train continues on down to Tulum and Bacalar Lagoon.

Digital Nomad Visa Income Requirements

How much income do you need to show to qualify for a digital nomad visa? According to this rundown for Europe, you may need to prove as little as €1,220 per month in Finland, but €7,075 in Iceland. Most are €5K or less, based on some multiple of the local minimum wage, not actual living costs—it’ll cost you far more than that income requirement to live in Finland. The best combo of low requirements and low costs is Montenegro, included in my book about living abroad for less, but with a monthly requirement of €1,400. In bargain-priced Albania the requirement is only €9,800 per year.

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A weekly newsletter with four quick bites, edited by Tim Leffel, author of A Better Life for Half the Price and The World’s Cheapest Destinations. See past editions here, where your like-minded friends can subscribe and join you.

05/15/25

What’s in my NOW? — Adele Gilani

issue #213

Adele Gilani is a painter, writer and former gallery owner. She has a free newsletter called Adele Delivers where you can see art from her favorite artists each week.

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PHYSICAL

• Green Tape – I picked up green tape like they use in The Bear to label everything in my fridge. Simple, effective, and cuts down on food waste.
• All Fours by Miranda July – I never pressure myself to finish a book, but this one? Obsessed—and I feel like I’m the last person I know to pick it up, but just in case, thought I’d mention it here. Miranda also has a wicked newsletter on substack.
• Thomas the Train Set – A friend gifted this to my son for his 4th birthday. Now, it’s the most beloved toy in the house. And if you don’t already. listen to the Thomas and Friends podcast with your kiddos, check that out too!

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DIGITAL

• David Lynch Free MasterClass – As a writer, this class completely shifted my approach to fiction.
• Twin Peaks – Speaking of David Lynch, we just finished the final episode, and I’m already tempted to start it from the top.

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INVISIBLE

Fermentation – Making Yogurt

Boil milk, cool it, add starter (yogurt of your choice), leave in the oven overnight on the bread proofing setting. Wake up to homemade yogurt. An invisible process with sweet results.

05/14/25

Japanese Tattoos / Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements

Issue No. 66

JAPANESE TATTOOS – FULL OF TRADITIONAL AND MODERN DESIGNS, CHARACTERS AND HISTORY IN THIS PHOTO-HEAVY BOOK

Japanese Tattoos: History, Culture, Design
by Brian Ashcraft and Hori Benny
Tuttle Publishing
2016, 160 pages, 7.5 x 10 x 0.7 inches (softcover)

Buy on Amazon

My skin doesn’t have a single tattoo, but I am touched by the art in tattoos, particularly traditional ones. The Japanese have a long and deep affinity for skin paintings, and have devised a complex iconography for them. The Japanese were early to pioneer color in tattoos, and gave high regard for the full body tattoo, treating the whole torso as a canvas. They even went recursive, sometimes inking a large character that sported a full-body tattoo within the tattoo. This book is chock full of classic themes, characters, and designs, with plenty of notes on the historical significance of tattoo culture. Of course it’s great inspiration for modern tattoos, but also for any other visual art. – Kevin Kelly

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LET’S SPLIT! IS AN ATLAS OF SEPARATISM, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND FRINGE GEOPOLITICAL MOVEMENTS

Let’s Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar
by Christopher F. Roth
Litwin Books
2015, 636 pages, 8.5 x 11 x 1.2 inches (hardcover)

Buy on Amazon

Let’s Split! causes me no end of joy and pain. It is my favorite Nietzsche quote come to life. (“Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule.”) It is also a 636-page atlas of separatism, national identity, fringe geopolitical movements, and a baleful cry from oppressed minority populations.

The book is put together with the obsessive care of an eccentric Victorian explorer documenting each step of his journey through uncharted lands, never stopping to discern between the observed real and the observed surreal. But Roth is no Victorian. He’s an anthropologist who’s worked with indigenous peoples in Canada and Alaska for governmental recognition and rights. Let’s Split! began life in 2011 as a blog that Roth maintains titled Springtime of Nations. (Full disclosure: by some trick in the time/space continuum, author Roth lives just a few miles from me and we have friends in common. I found this out after I discovered his blog and book.)

Conceptually, the idea of a nation-state is relatively new in the spectrum of development of human societies. People were once few on the earth and tended toward the homogeneity of tribal affiliation. As populations grew, coalitions, hegemony, and politics took shape both psychologically and politically.

Organized by continent, Let’s Split! leaves no territory behind. (Though Roth rightfully excludes “cybernations” and the giggling masses of “micronations” invented by bored teenagers declaring their basement lairs sovereign territory no longer oppressed by the evil overlords, Mom & Dad.) Included with each entry are pictures of the flags, potential population, geographic size, and finally, its likelihood for autonomy.

And this is where Let’s Split! transforms into something beyond a history, an atlas, or a dry-as-dust encyclopedia. Entries for the Eastern European region ripple with references to long-forgotten kingdoms and internecine rivalries. We follow the migrations of the Mongols and the surge of conquerors to the painful remnants of a peoples’ history written in blood. Understanding these thousand-year-old grudges makes the all-too-many modern skirmishes throughout the world profoundly real.

Let’s Split! is loaded with enough facts and minutiae to delight history geeks yet remains highly readable. Let the pages fall open and you’ll be immediately drawn into the conflict within. Make no mistake, a guide to breakaway states and freedom movements is rife with conflict and suffering. As Westerners, it’s all too easy for us to sit in judgment as chaotic events in other parts of the world are blipped onto our screens, then summarily dismissed. But please don’t let that, nor the high price dissuade you. (Though I would love to see a lower priced paperback edition.) Let’s Split! is a worthy addition to your library. – Christina Ward

Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.

05/13/25

Animation

Tools for Possibilities: issue no. 137

The bible of animation movement

The Animator’s Survival Kit

I have no words for the depth of this master class in visual animation. This is the definitive source for learning how to perform — as in act — by drawing; how to create emotion with a series of subtly modified images. There’s lots involved in animation these days: this book is focused on a single thing: teaching you how to make animated movement come alive. Make a stick figure walk cautiously. A table lamp cower with fear. A robin soar. A car that makes you cry. Hundreds of tutorial illustrations show you how. Applies as much, or more, to digital animation as to pencil drawings. KK

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Easy stop-motion and time-lapse video

iStopMotion

This is a very cool application that creates stop-motion and time-lapse videos. For years my kids and I have been making claymation episodes, doll and figure animations, paper cutout sequences, and fun time-lapse movies with our family handy-cam, but our primitive method of simply blinking the on-button has always been less than satisfactory. Our brain-dead way creates three problems: the interval is too long (jerky movement), you can’t see what motion should be next, and you can’t edit out goofs when you make a boo-boo — which is 100% certain.

iStopMotion software is a much better way to do animation, and it solves all three problems. You connect a live video feed from your camera to your computer (via USB or Firewire) and then you control the film from your keyboard — or this is cool — via voice command! After you capture a frame, the program overlays that frame as transparent layer over the current camera view so you can see exactly where you need to move next. You can even request the last 5 frames (onion skinning animators call it) to get a sense of direction and trajectory, which allows a very fine tuning of the motion. And you can edit mistakes, and do redos on the fly. All this is simple enough that my 7-year-old could instantly manage it. Yet it is sophisticated enough that film students use this software for thesis projects. Making time-lapse films is even easier.

The joy of this tool is that your computer screen rather than your camera screen drives the animation. To overcome the downside that you need to do all your filming within cable reach of your laptop iStopMotion now comes as a phone app, too, so you can view your work on your mobile. There’s also an iPad version for filming with this tablet (which needs to be steady). All are aimed at letting kids do animation quickly. But its good enough for slow adults like me.

There are three programs in this genre. I’ve tried all three (iStopMotion, FrameThief, and Stop-Motion Studio) and iStopMotion is by far the superior. It has the most features, ease of use, speed and stability. It is also the best designed. — KK

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Desktop animation how-to

The Complete Animation Course

All films will become animations. That prediction is based on the rate at which special effects become standard effects in big-budget films. Even a “live action” movie these days is composed frame by frame, and the skills and logic of animation take over. An ordinary digital camera, a hi-end PC or Mac, with iMovie software or equivalent, gives anyone the tools to do cinematic animation without tears. The Complete Animation Course is the best of many recent books riding the re-newed popularity of animated films. This guide is a great how-to orientation for making your own animated film using affordable technology. It introduces you to classic animation basics, and the many methods which combine old fashioned techniques (cartoon, paper collages, claymation) with computer based tools. I found it had just the right level of detail — sufficient to get you going without bogging down in how to do what’s already been done.

Twelve Principles of Animation

1. Squash and Stretch.
2. Anticipation. This is setting up the action before it happens, usually with a slight movement in the opposite direction to the main one.
3. Staging. This is related to the way the film as a whole is “shot,” considering angles, framing, and scene length.
4. Straight-ahead Action and Pose-to-Pose. Straight-ahead action starts at one point and finishes at another in a single continuous movement, such as running, whereas pose-to-pose is a variety of actions in one scene requiring clearly delineated key frames to mark the action’s extreme point. How the in-betweens are executed can alter the whole rhythm of the action.
5. Follow-through and Overlapping Action. Follow-through is the opposite of anticipation. When a character stops, certain parts remain in motion, such as hair or clothes. Overlapping action is when the follow-through of one action becomes the anticipation of the next one.
6. Slow In — Slow Out. This means using more drawings at the beginning and end of an action and fewer in the middle. This creates a more lifelike feeling to the movement.
7. Arcs. These are used to describe natural movement. All actions create circular movements because they usually pivot around a central point, usually a joint. Arcs are also used to describe a line of action through a character.
8. Secondary Action is just that, another action that takes place at the same time as the main one. This may be something as simple as turning the head from side to side during a walk sequence.
9. Timing. This is something that can’t be taught. In the same way that comedians who rely on it to get the most from their gags have to learn it through experience, you too will get it right only through practice. Timing is how you get characters to interact naturally. Timing also has to do with the technical side of deciding how many drawings are used to portray an action.
10. Exaggeration. This is the enhancement of a physical attribute or movement, but don’t make the mistake of exaggerating the exaggeration.
11. Solid Drawing. This conveys a sense of three-dimensionality through linework, color, and shading.
12. Appeal This is giving personality to the characters you draw. If you can convey it without the sound track, you know you are on the right track.

These are not hard and fast rules, but they have been found to work since the early days of animation. Bear them in mind at the storyboard stage and your animation will definitely have more fluidity and believability.

05/12/25

What’s in my NOW? — Adele Gilani